5 Ways to Boost Self-Confidence in Your Career

Career self-confidence is vital to your success. After all, if you don’t believe in yourself, how will anyone else have any faith in your abilities?

When you have self-confidence, you’ll find that advancing in the workplace goes much more smoothly and naturally. People are attracted to self-possession and self-esteem. That’s why we’re constantly told to stand tall, speak up, lean in, and look confident. Those qualities are invaluable no matter your career.

For most of us, it happens naturally. Our careers are huge self-confidence boosters. Every achievement can serve to improve your self-esteem from getting called out by a leader to getting a promotion or even accomplishing a difficult task. It’s all these little things together that make for great career satisfaction, which turns into self-confidence in your career.

Unfortunately, 85% of the world’s population is affected by low self-esteem, according to The Self Esteem Book by Joe Rubino. So, what happens when you need to boost self-confidence in your career to become your best professional self?

How to Boost Self-Confidence

Whether your career is the one responsible for intimidating you and taking away your self-confidence or it’s something you’ve always struggled with, a lack of self-esteem and confidence can be detrimental. Confidence can take years of experience and practice to build, and yet just a few days to tear down.

Self-confidence in your career is as simple as knowing what you do well and what your value is. So, the next time you struggle with trying to boost your career self-confidence, try these five steps to rewire your brain with focus and intention.

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Also read: How To Build Confidence at Work: 6 Practical Tactics | Your Best Professional Self Series

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Fake it till you make it

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times, “Fake it until you make it.” It’s a timeless saying because it works. Most career professionals feel like they’re not doing enough or they don’t know enough. It’s easy to look at work undone and feel inadequate or to compare yourself to someone else and think they’re better, but you don’t need that added pressure.

Instead, listen to Amy Cuddy’s inspiring TED talk and learn to boost self-confidence by faking it until you make it. Walk around like you’re a powerful CEO. Sit and stand with a picture of confidence—shoulders back head held high—even if you don’t feel it. Looking and acting confident, even when you feel the exact opposite, can have amazing effects. It can physically change the levels of testosterone and cortisol in the brain to make you feel better.

The idea is delusional optimism, and it works.

Focus on progress instead of perfection

You’ll never be perfect. You’ll never reach the absolute pinnacle where no change is needed. Instead, career self-confidence comes from the idea of focusing on your progress instead of perfection.

Research has shown that the more roles you fill, the more sources of career self-confidence you have. So, don’t beat yourself up when you have to change jobs or you fail at a project. Every step along your career path will make you stronger, more self-aware, and will boost self-confidence.

The truth of the matter is that we all make mistakes, but those mistakes are often the best lessons we need to learn. They teach you about yourself and give you a chance to grow. When you face challenges and you make errors, don’t let them get you down. Instead, focus on how you won’t make the same mistake again and how you took a step forward.

Look to your career mentors

When you need a career self-confidence boost, look to your favorite career icons. Look to those inspiring men and women who have made incredible headway and accomplished amazing things.

• Whitney Wolfe Herd quit Tinder after suing for sexual harassment. Then, a little while later, she went on to build Bumble, a billion-dollar viral-dating sensation.
• Elon Musk is considered the “architect of tomorrow.” Not only is he changing the game in the automobile industry with Tesla, but he’s also revolutionized rocketry with SpaceX.
• Anne Wojcicki started her career in health care investments where she quickly became disillusioned. The result was the creation of 23andMe, a personal genomics company that’s exploding in popularity.
• Jeff Bezos began Amazon in 1995 as an online bookstore. Its initial success was meteoric, reaching $20,000 in sales a week within two months and going public two years later. Now, he’s known as the $100 billion man.

It’s these career icons and mentors who will motivate you in tough times and help instill confidence in everything you do. The key thing to remember is that all of these individuals were just like you at one point. We all start somewhere, and the only place to go is up if you work at it.

When you’re in a self-doubting mode, use these career mentors as fallbacks to keep you believing in yourself and to boost self-confidence.

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Also read: What is Professional Presence and How Can I Achieve It?

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Write down your goals

What do you want out of your career? We all have goals. Knowing those goals and writing them down will then help you figure out what you need to do to achieve success.

These goals will end up being inspiration and motivation for every day of your work life. The key is to make them S.M.A.R.T.—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. For instance, a good goal is “increase sales by 25 percent next quarter” instead of something like “make more money.”

When you write down your goals, you give yourself a focus and a sense of dedication. Then, every milestone you hit will give you an instant career self-confidence boost. Your goals will also help you keep going in the right direction when things go wrong, so you’re not tempted to give up or give in.

Spend time on your passions

If you want to boost self-confidence in your career, sometimes you just need to take a step back and focus on pursuing your passions. Even if it’s just for fifteen minutes a day, there are many benefits to doing things you feel passionate about.

The reason why is that you’re typically self-confident in things you love. You like them because you’re good at them. So, spending time doing things that give you confidence will bleed over into the rest of your life. You can then take those positive thoughts and attitude and use them in your day-to-day job.

And, truthfully, the more hobbies and interests you have outside the workplace the better. They help expand your mind, reduce stress, and help you approach work with a renewed sense of vigor. When you’re more effective at your job, that’s a career self-confidence boost right there.

These exercises to boost self-confidence in your career can help you every single day, particularly when you’re struggling with a bad week or month. Just remember that self-confidence is a skill you have to work at regularly, so never stop.

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Looking for more Guidance on Building Confidence at Work?
Check out our Collection of Leadership-focused Articles

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